Wind farms paid to stop turning as public told to switch off lights

Poor infrastructure from turbines overwhelms the grid and cost the taxpayer nearly £1billion last year

THE National Grid paid wind farms to switch off on Tuesday evening at the same time households were asked to turn their lights off to save energy.

Between 4.30pm and 6pm on Tuesday, wind farms were handed around £65,000 to stop producing electricity, according to data from the UK Wind Curtailment Monitor.

At the same time, households were being asked to switch off their devices to help save electricity, amid concerns from National Grid ESO that it would not have sufficient energy supply.

In the end, these concerns were not realised, but the grid operator said payments to wind farms to switch off were likely to occur in the future even as the country was forced to turn off devices to stop blackouts.

Over the course of Monday and Tuesday, as the country faced strains in energy supply, wind farms were paid more than £1million to stop producing enough electricity to power 360,000 homes for a day.

A lack of infrastructure to carry electricity from windfarms, which are mainly located offshore and in Scotland, means National Grid ESO regularly asks them to stop producing to avoid overwhelming the local grid. The cost is borne by billpayers and reached record highs of nearly £1billion last year, reflecting the growth of wind power, as well as record energy prices.

A spokesman for National Grid said bottlenecks in the system meant it could not always get the electricity where it was needed, even when supplies were low.

While the Government has encouraged the development of wind farms to help cut carbon emissions in recent decades, it has failed to put adequate investment on the infrastructure needed to transport or store the electricity.

The system was described as “unsustainable” by a top Government energy adviser and raises doubts about the pace of wind power development in the UK.

Dieter Helm, a professor of economics at Oxford University, and energy adviser to the Government, said it was “obviously not a sustainable position”.

“It is a consequence of developing wind on a site-by-site basis with no economic incentives to build in the right places and the failure to develop the grid in an integrated and coordinated way,” he said.

In 2022 consumers paid £215million to turn windfarms off, and £717million to buy gas powered electricity to make up the difference, according to figures from the UK Wind Curtailment Monitor. The National Grid forecasts that levels of curtailment will increase fourfold by 2030, with costs forecast to reach £2.5billion a year.

The majority of curtailment is from farms in and off the coast of Scotland.

‘Bottlenecks in the system meant [National Grid] could not always get the electricity where it was needed’